In a significant revelation, the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731 in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, released a comprehensive 69-page document detailing the heinous acts of Japan's top-secret biological and chemical warfare unit during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45).
The newly unveiled file provides an in-depth look into the operations of Unit 731, listing personal information of 52 staff members. It includes their names, household registrations, involvement in war crimes, and records of their transfers between Unit 731 and Unit 516, another base camp for biological and chemical warfare located in Qiqihar City. According to Jin Chengmin, the museum's curator, the document highlights the close cooperation between the two units, including joint poison gas experiments.
One notable revelation from the file is the movement of personnel between the units. For instance, a member who served as a health officer in Unit 516 was later transferred to Unit 731, underscoring the intertwined operations of these units. Furthermore, the records show that four members of Unit 731 were sent to a Japanese-controlled medical university in Harbin for a three-year \"medical training\" as military family students, indicating a deliberate effort to integrate military and medical training.
Jin emphasized the significance of these findings, stating, \"This provides key information on Japan's military, political, and medical cooperation in training young soldiers, further proving that the implementation of human experiments and germ warfare was a top-down, organized, premeditated, and systematic group crime of Japanese militarism.\"
The document was discovered at the National Archives of Japan and was returned to China in 2022 after extensive communications and negotiations. Established in 1935, Unit 731 served as the nerve center for Japan's biological warfare efforts in China and Southeast Asia during the war. The unit conducted unethical experiments on living humans to test germ-releasing and chemical weapons, resulting in the deaths of at least 3,000 individuals through human experimentation and over 300,000 more across China due to biological weapons.
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New document reveals further details of Japanese chemical warfare unit
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